Table Of ContentMELION AND BICLAREL
TWO OLD FRENCH
WERWOLF LAYS
Edited and translated by
Amanda Hopkins
Liverpool Online Series
Critical Editions of French Texts
10
Liverpool Online Series
Critical Editions of French Texts
Series Editors
Timothy Unwin
Glyn S. Burgess
Editorial Board
Pollie Bromilow
Kay Chadwick
Charles Forsdick
Alan Howe
Richard Waller
Advisory Board
Peter Ainsworth
David Bellos
Rosemary Lloyd
Henry Phillips
Gerald Prince
Deirdre Reynolds
Jean-Marie Volet
Jane Winston
Published by
The University of Liverpool, Department of French
Modern Languages Building
Liverpool L69 3BX
© Amanda Hopkins 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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of the publishers.
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First published 2005
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Melion and Biclarel
Two Old French Werwolf Lays
Liverpool Online Series
Critical Editions of French Texts
The aim of this series is to establish a resource bank of critical editions and
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Timothy Unwin
Glyn S. Burgess
Series Editors
Contents
Acknowledgements .............................................6
Introduction ...................................................7
Melion ......................................................51
Biclarel ......................................................83
Bibliography.................................................107
Acknowledgements
I should like to express my thanks to Glyn S. Burgess for his continued help and
encouragement, and especially for inviting me to choose texts to edit for the
Liverpool Online Series.
Thanks are due to Linda Paterson, who kindly went through my translations
and whose suggestions resulted in great improvements; and to Keith Busby for
his great interest in the project, and for checking the transcription and translation
of Biclarel and offering many suggestions. I am also grateful to Gillian Rogers
for drawing my attention to a particular depiction of shields in the Bayeux
Tapestry.
Thanks also to Matt Grice for his unfailing patience and enthusiasm for the
project.
Introduction
1
Melion and Biclarel are two redactions of a werwolf tale which occurs in several
French versions in the high Middle Ages. These include Marie de France’s
Bisclavret, written in the 1160s or 1170s,2 of which Biclarel is a reworking.3
Melion, a Breton lay like Marie’s narrative, has close parallels with Bisclavret,
but significant alterations in plot and tone suggest the working of other
influences.
Manuscripts, Editions, Translations
MELION
Melion is preserved in a single manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal,
3516, f. 343r, col. 1 – 344r, col. 4, now commonly identified as MS C, although
in earlier editions (Horak, Grimes) it is designated P. Written in the Picard
dialect,4 the manuscript is dated around 1268.5 A second manuscript, Turin, L. iv.
33, f. 60r, col.1 – f. 63r, col. 1, was destroyed in a fire.6 This manuscript, known
as T, was also in the Picard dialect and dated to the early fifteenth century;
fortunately, variants were recorded in detail by Horak and are largely reproduced
in Grimes.
1
Parts of this introduction originally appeared in Hopkins, ‘Identity in the Narrative Breton Lay’,
pp. 63-96. See also Hopkins, ‘Bisclavret to Biclarel’, pp. 317-23 (for full details of all items
mentioned, see the Bibliography).
2
Burgess and Brook, Three Old French Narrative Lays, p. 7. Quotations from Marie’s lays are
from the edition by Ewert. Unless otherwise stated, English translations of all Old French material
throughout are my own.
3
Marie’s text was also translated into Old Norse prose and appears in a collection known as
Strengleikar. References in the present work are to the edition by Cook and Tveitane, in which
the narrative, named Biclaret, appears on pp. 85-99.
4
Tobin, Les Lais anonymes, p. 290, cf. pp. 86-89. Quotations from the anonymous Old French
lays, other than Melion, edited here, are from Tobin’s edition.
5
Burgess, The Old French Narrative Lay, p. 93.
6
Tobin, Les Lais anonymes, p. 289. She supplies no further details about the fire.
7
Two Old French Werwolf Lays
Melion was first edited by L.-J.-N. Monmerqué and Francisque Michel in
1832, then by Horak in 1882, Grimes in 1928, Peter Holmes in 19527 and Tobin
in 1976. Tobin’s edition has been reproduced by Pagani with a facing Italian
translation (1984), and by Micha with a facing French translation (1992). Prose
translations of Melion exist as follows: into French (Régnier-Bohler, 1979),
Dutch (Jongen and Verhuyck, 1985), Spanish (de Riquer, 1987) and English
(Nicholson, 1999).
BICLAREL
Biclarel is an extract from the first redaction (A-text) of Le Roman de Renart le
Contrefait,8 a text of some 32,000 lines, preserved in MS Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, fr. 1630, anc. 76304, de la Mare 284; Biclarel appears in
f.188 col. a – f.190, col. d. Displaying characteristics of the Champenois dialect,9
the manuscript dates from the first third of the fourteenth century.10
Biclarel was first published by Tarbé in 1851 under the heading ‘l’histoire de
Biclarel’, with some of the Champenois dialectal spellings and word forms
converted to standard Francien forms.11 In 1914, Raynaud and Lemaitre published
7
I regret that I have been unable to consult this edition.
8
Le Roman de Renart ‘is a specifically medieval reworking of the universal fables best known
to modern readers from the collection of Aesop’, whose origins are contemporaneous with Marie
de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas and Béroul (Gravdal, p. 47). Renart le Contrefait (‘Renart
the Hypocrite’) was the last of numerous medieval redactions of the text; the author, as the editors
Raynaud and Lemaitre observe, intended ‘non pas imiter le Roman de Renart, mais se contrefaire
à Renart’ (I, pp. v-vi, their emphasis) and to provide a critique of society, particularly church
figures (Flinn, Le Roman de Renart, p. 369).
9
‘Mediæval Champagne did not possess a clearly-defined dialect of its own; it was rather a
meeting-place of dialectal features of the Centre (Ile-de-France), North and East. The language
of Southern Champagne, with Troyes as its capital, is largely identical with that of the Ile-de-
France…’ (Reid, ‘Introduction’ to Foerster’s edition of Yvain, p. xvii, cf. Pope, From Latin to
Modern French, p. 497, §1324).
10
Raynaud and Lemaitre, I, p. v.
11
For example, Tarbé substitutes Francien e for the characteristic Champenois a before some
nasals: thus MS an, ancore, antier are rendered as en, encore, entier throughout and san
standardised to sen (see Pope, p. 173, §447 (2) and Reid, p. xx. Cf. the works of Chrétien de
Troyes for similar dialectal features, for example Yvain: ‘Il n’a courtoisie ne san / An plet
d’oiseuse maintenir’ (vv. 98-99)). Tarbé retains other Champenois elements, such as the stressed
ge / gie forms (cf. Pope, p. 321, §829).
8
Introduction
a complete edition of the B-text of Renart le Contrefait, and included Biclarel in
the Appendix among transcriptions of passages from the A-text which had been
omitted from the later redaction. The present work provides the first translation
of Biclarel.
Date and Authorship
MELION
The author of Melion is unknown. Tobin describes him as ‘un remanieur de vieux
motifs, un jongleur professionnel’, whose talent is inferior to that of Marie de
France (Les Lais anonymes, p. 292). Following earlier scholars, Tobin supplies
a broad date of composition between 1170 and 1267;12 from her examination of
the internal textual evidence, especially the name of the hero, she posits a
narrower date, between 1190 and 1204.13
BICLAREL
The author of Le Roman de Renart le Contrefait provides some autobiographical
details. He states that the first version was written between 1319, when he was
about forty years old, and 1322; he began the B-text in 1328 and completed it
around 1342 (Raynaud and Lemaitre, I, p. vi). Many of Renart’s adventures have
been omitted from the B-text and other passages rearranged; the religious angle
has been developed, and additional passages on theology, hagiography, history
12
The earlier date may indicate composition contemporaneous with, even earlier than, Marie’s
Bisclavret.
13
The narrow dating supposes that the author may have taken his hero’s name from Chrétien de
Troyes’s Melianz de Lis (Tobin, p. 292) in Erec et Enide, in which he appears in a list of Round
Table knights (ed. Roques, v. 1678), or from an episode in Perceval, in which he is beaten by
Gawain (ed. Roach, vv. 4816-5601). Internal evidence suggests that Chrétien was writing before
1191 (Lacy, The Arthurian Handbook, p. 68). Tobin’s terminus ad quem supposes that Melion’s
author used the name before Lahamon had attached it to Mordred’s son in his Brut. Tobin notes
(p. 291) that R. S. Loomis proposes that the Brut was composed after 1204 (Lahamon refers to
Eleanor of Aquitaine, who died in that year, in the past tense), although he admits the possibility
of earlier composition around 1189 or 1190. Tobin (p. 291) also refers to a variant of the name,
in the form Melahan, which occurs in La Mort le Roi Artu, dated around 1230 by Frappier. Tobin
also suggests that Melion’s author may have known Andreas Capellanus’s Tractatus de amore,
written around 1184 (p. 291).
9
Two Old French Werwolf Lays
and science have appeared (Raynaud and Lemaitre, I, p. vi), alterations which
Flinn attributes to the sensibilities of the poet’s increased age (Le Roman de
Renart, p. 372), noting (p. 365) that the B-text also displays ‘une évolution bien
prononcée dans la pensée et le style du poète’.
The author identifies himself only as a ‘clerc de Troyes’; he explains that he
began to write in order to alleviate boredom, having left the church for a woman
(Raynaud and Lemaitre, I, p. v). Flinn observes that he seems to regret his
decision (pp. 371-72); as Biclarel demonstrates, he certainly evinces a strong
misogynous streak.14
The Narrative Breton Lay15
The sub-romance genre known variously as the narrative lay,16 the Breton lay and
the narrative Breton lay has remained in constant scholarly focus for over two
hundred years, yet much about it remains obscure or contentious; and the
difficulty of determining the exact nature of the form, and how the medieval
world used and understood the term lai,17 means that critics have been unable to
agree even the number of extant lays.18
The narrative lay in Old French octosyllabic couplets seems to have been
produced from the third quarter of the twelfth century; Marie de France is often
credited with being the originator of the form (Burgess and Brook, Three Old
French Narrative Lays, p. 7), and certainly seems to be crediting herself with the
14
Perhaps due to his clerical education, perhaps to his personal experiences; or, as Flinn suggests
(pp. 397-401), he may have been influenced by his reading of the works of Jean de Meun.
15
For a fuller introduction to the Breton Lays, see Burgess and Brook, General Introduction,
Three Old French Narrative Lays, pp. 7-9.
16
Coined, to distinguish it from the musical form, by Hœpffner (Les Lais de Marie de France,
p. 47).
17
U. T. Holmes notes that ‘[b]efore or after 1200 the use of the word lai had broadened to
include a tale of any type’ (A History of Old French Literature, p. 192; cf. Burgess and Brook,
p. 89).
18
In addition to the lays by Marie de France, the other texts generally accepted as lays are those
included in Burgess, The Old French Narrative Lay. For an overview of the texts and issues, see
Burgess and Brook, pp. 7-11.
10
